Watching Chad Le Clos watch Phelps go on to victory and a twentieth Olympic gold medal, I found myself thinking back to 1982’s Oscar winning best film, Chariots of Fire, and its depiction of Eric Liddell, who stunned everyone with a world record breaking gold medal win in the 400 meter race. He wasn’t supposed to win.

Liddell pushed himself like a man possessed. He didn’t weaken. With the tape only 20 yards away . . . Liddell threw his head farther back, gathered himself together and shot forward.

A man possessed.

The legendary Eric Liddell ran only for the glory of God. He had refused to run the 100 meter race – his best event, and one he was expected to win – because it was scheduled on a Sunday, a holy day. Instead, he ran those races in which little was expected of him. He would go on to win a bronze medal in the 200 meter race and then to smash the world-record with a gold medal win in the 400 meter race – triumphant and true to himself. Doing the right thing.

Edging closer to the fifth anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, a milestone of sorts, I am thinking about Liddell – the man behind the athlete from the 1924 Paris Olympics -and his resolve not to run on a Sunday. Eric Liddell didn’t bargain. I cannot say the same for me. When cancer came to call I reverted to childish ways of bargaining with God. Half prayer, half promise: “Dear God, I’ll be a better wife, mother, daughter, friend, boss, human being in general, if you could just see to it that my Oncotype DX number falls in the really good range,” or “I will never complain about anything ever again, God, if you could just keep the cancer at bay.”

I have questions for this God, too, and they come in rapid succession, disturbing my rest to this day: “Did I get cancer because I used my cellphone while driving, or was it directly related to my having a baby at 34, at what some pregnancy books in 1997 described as “advanced maternal age.” Perhaps it was because I hadn’t been able to breastfeed nor had I been diligent about buying certified-organic produce. Or maybe it had more to do with the full-bodied Zinfandel I used to enjoy at the end of a day, pre-diagnosis. Will the cancer progress because I have been sloppy about diet and exercise? But mostly, the question for which there is no satisfactory response, “Why, oh why, did my darling daughter’s life have to be interrupted by my cancer?” At some level, I think I believe that I caused my own cancer, that it is my fault. I must have done something, right? From the ridiculous to the religious, I wander, and I wonder if perhaps I have rebuked God.

I don’t know when I last heard someone use “rebuke” in any context, but this cancer continues to conjure what Edna O’Brien describes as the inescapable themes of my childhood, which today are wrapped up in the long-ago Sunday morning church services at the All Saints Parish Church in Antrim. I can almost hear the minister, like many before him, deliver from the book of Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 11 – 13:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Childish things – like praying to a “quid pro quo” God. So my spiritual struggle continues, all the while mindful and moved beyond measure by charity and love and the knowledge that my name remains on the prayer lists of people I don’t even know.

Childish things and questions of faith and Michael Phelps in Rio bring me back to Eric Liddell’s story, a story I know only because of its interpretation on the big screen. How I love the movies, especially those based on a well-written screenplay. While it has been highly entertaining in some social settings, being able to quote huge chunks of script has proven only useful in the observation of classroom instruction. With a nod to Dr. Madeline Hunter, I am a master of what is known in the teaching trade as “script taping.” An auditory learner, I can often recall what I heard verbatim. Admittedly, it is a selective kind of memory that did not serve me well as a student trying to recall the stuff of lectures that would prove to a crotchety professor of an excruciatingly dull Philosophy course that I had, in fact, been listening during his lectures. Nor did it help me readily recall anything I heard from the doctor who informed me of the tumors in my right breast. No. That would have been too useful. Instead, because I’ve wrestled with the same angst as, let’s say, the eponymous Shirley Valentine, I know by heart what she says while staring down the camera:

Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings, and dreams, and hopes if we don’t ever use them? That’s where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.

Ah, that Willy Russell knows how to get into the head of a woman in the middle of her life.

But this evening, it isn’t Shirley Valentine or Jane Fonda’s Sally Bender in Coming Home. It is Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, holding court with a group of admirers at the Highland Games, waxing lyrical about faith and God in the context of a race:

I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.

His sister, a devout missionary cannot comprehend why her brother would choose a secular sporting event in paris. Poignant and gentle, he rebuffs his sister, smiling with the assurance and grace of a man who is doing the right thing:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.

I feel his pleasure.

I am no athlete, but once upon a time I loved to run. I had planned to run the 2012 Belfast marathon, but cancer got in the way, forcing me to abandon that dream. I recall January of that year and a tentative post-surgical lap around a hospital ward. Bedraggled and unsteady with all that was attached to me – the urinary catheter and the JP drains, and the stunning realization that standing up straight was an impossible feat just three days after a DIEP flap reconstruction – I thought I would never run again, but magically, just two weeks later, I was walking along the Arizona Grand canal with my husband and our girl. Standing a little straighter, I was thrilled to be outside, the last of the JP drains removed, albeit frustrated to be reduced to a stroll. My feet wanted to break into a run.

The third day of my adjuvant tamoxifen therapy coincided with the first truly Spring like day in Phoenix, the temperature almost at 80 degrees. No side effects to report with 1,822 days to go, by which time my daughter would have voted for the first time. It was my season of rebirth and recovery, and it began the morning I ventured out for my run. Entirely alone. Not too strenuous and no more than a “good stretch of the legs” along the hard, packed dirt of my favorite stretch of canal, it was perfect. There was no hint of pain, and it was quiet save for the sound of my feet pounding on the dirt.

That silent sound was familiar and comforting, taking me back to daily runs through Antrim Castle Grounds and along the pathways of the Lough Neagh shore. And whispering in my ears then and still, the voice of Eric Liddell.

I think I said that grief is passive. It creeps over you in those famous waves, you know, whereas mourning is an active process of remembering, reliving the good and the bad, and defanging it in a way. Until you have examined all those memories, they don’t lose their power to undo you.

~ Joan Didion

It is a beautiful day in the desert, unseasonably warm. An explosion of white blossoms on the pear tree in my front yard confirms that our winter is probably over. It’s only February.

Inside my house, the air hangs heavy and unfamiliar, the way it does when I return home after a vacation. Time for a good spring cleaning, I can hear my mother say. It is, but I have the flu, and this time it is different strain. It is the first time since Ken died that I have been sick. I am sick, and Ken is not here. He’s not here. The wound gapes open once more – he is dead.

I didn’t expect an early morning bout of inconsolable crying along with the chills, the coughing, and the fever. I should have known better. I should know by now that grief arrives unexpectedly and with a potency that takes my breath away. Sometimes it shows up like those visitors who arrive at your door too late on a school-night, unannounced and well-intended. They overstay their welcome, somehow oblivious to the dropped hints and unsubtle signs that they really should be leaving. Wearily polite and resigned, we do the mannerly thing and wait for them to leave rather than ask them to go. We wait.

So I will wait. I will wait for Grief to leave, knowing that I don’t know when it will return, only that it will. I am in the waiting place.

In her memoir The Long Goodbye Meghan O’Rourke describes this constant state of anticipation as a “queer dread,”against which I steel myself until the first birthday, Christmas, road trip, flu without him.

If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.

In the waiting place, I am “unlearning” the flu. I am unlearning how to be sick without the person who cared for me when I was sick. I am learning that I am not a good student.

My cancer diagnosis had scared him. He never saw it coming. Nor did I. In our marriage, we had struck a bargain of sorts – as the older man, he would be the one with the health problems – a congenital heart defect and an aortic abdominal aneurysm that we watched for years until it grew to just the right size for the surgery that would repair it and allow him to retire. Younger and more neurotic, I would be the hypochondriac given to the odd cold or flu, and he would look after me because he loved me so much and also because he didn’t really believe I could look after myself. I think he thought I was always on the verge of being broken. He was not entirely wrong.

Outside, the sounds of leaf-blowers and lawn-mowers take me back to a January morning in 2012, my first day at home after three days in the hospital. I am calling out for help. Bleary-eyed, two thirds of my tiny family burst into the bedroom to find me needing to lean on them so I can just get out of bed, stand up, and walk to the toilet. I am a pathetic sight. Bedraggled and bent over, with long tubes draining bloody stuff from three incision sites on my pale torso, I am still in a post-operative fog. Otherwise a healthy 48 year old, I am leveled by the extent of my dependence on my husband and my child. My desire to get out of the hospital so quickly – just three days after eight hours of surgery that included the amputation of my right breast and its reconstruction using arteries and muscle and fat from my abdomen – did not take into account the short-term impact on my family. That my gentle 14 year-old daughter (whose only preoccupations should be acne and periods and homework ) would choose to don rubber gloves to clean and record the color and quantity of the contents of surgical drains 1, 2, and 3, each attached by a too-long tube to my underarm and at either end of a large hip-to-hip incision. That my husband would have to sleep on the couch because our bed had been transformed into a mountain of uninviting pillows to keep me reclined at 45 degrees with my feet elevated.

Later that morning, the sound of weekly yard work wafted in from my neighbor’s backyard. Ken was afraid the noise would disturb the rest the doctors said I so badly needed. It prompted him to sit on the edge of our bed, hold my hand, and share a story, the details of which had stayed with him for over 40 years. He recalled a morning when he was a young man, working with a construction crew in Tempe where they had been assigned to repair a water pipe. The week prior, signs had been posted in the neighborhood advising all concerned that the water pipe repair would necessitate early morning use of machinery, the noisy kind: dump-trucks and backhoes that would be operated by laborers yelling to each other as they dug up and replaced the pipe. On the day their work began, an elderly man had rushed out to confront them, arms flailing. Visibly upset, he complained to Ken that their noise was disturbing his wife who that very morning, lay in their home, dying of cancer. He begged the workers to stop making so much noise so his wife could rest. “Please, please just allow her to rest.”

Life and its work goes on as it must, and they couldn’t stop the job. It moved me to hear Ken recall this moment as though it had happened just the day before, and to know that these men paused before continuing their work on down the road. While they could not silence the machinery, they used hand signals – no spoken words, no shouting – to complete the job as quietly as they could.

He told me he hadn’t thought of that distraught old man until that morning in our bedroom, and after telling me the story, he went outside and asked the men with leaf-blowers and lawnmowers if they wouldn’t mind coming back next week. The work could wait.

Profoundly saddened by the recent deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey, I barely looked at the clock, the way I have done for the past three years, on January 19th. I am loath to declare the date I underwent the mastectomy and reconstruction of my right breast, a “cancerversary,” one of those cheery-sounding sniglets used by many ensnared within the disease to mark its milestones. Milestones. The day a lump was discovered or a diagnosis delivered; the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung. There are so many of them, these words made up to minimize and manage the scourge that is cancer, to shelter us from it, to make us smile through it even as we are scared. So scared.

me with Sherman Alexie

One of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie. says that writers must write about the scariest things in their lives. Intrigued, I went to hear him speak one evening in a museum in Phoenix. I took my daughter, in Junior High at the time and immersed in his Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Along with everyone else, we laughed as he shared what were surely the scariest things about his early years on the Spokane Indian Reserve. His own laughter as he described his father’s beverage of choice,”Squodka” – a mix of Squirt soda and vodka – belied, I imagine, the anguish of a young boy confronting the reality of an alcoholic father who disappeared for days at a time. We know Sherman Alexie knows that alcoholism on the rez is no laughing matter.

Nor is cancer. It is a serious disease deserving of serious words, but we do a lousy job of talking about it in a way that confronts the reality of it – beyond awareness – or that leads us to knowing what causes it or how to prevent it. We speak in codes that keep this scariest of things at a safe distance. Code is acceptable in the cancer conversation and not just the pink stuff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the “save the boobies” fare. Codes. “Mastectomy,” for example, is code for “amputation.” I wonder. Were I an amputee in the “traditional” sense, would I refer to the day I lost a limb as my “ampuversary”? No. I would not. Medical euphemisms abound. I used to toss around “lumpectomy” as though it were the removal of an inconsequential wart, instead of what it really is – a partial amputation. When I was first diagnosed, I presumed a lumpectomy was in the cards for me. As a word, it didn’t pack much of a punch, so it didn’t frighten me. Then I met my surgeon who pointed out that my cancer was not amenable to lumpectomy given its proximity to the nipple and the fact that I was not endowed with large breasts. Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. As her meticulous notes would later confirm, “dissection was very difficult given the very small circumareolar incision used for the skin-sparing mastectomy.” It would require additional time and effort, not to mention skill and patience. So she recommended (and I nodded sagely in agreement as though I knew what she was talking about) a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. Duly spared – spared, no less – the skin would then accommodate a reconstruction using my own tissue. Simple.

Reading through the details of my surgery, you would never know that cancer and its treatment is ugly or that it hurts. At times it sounds downright regal, befitting a fanfare of trumpets, especially that climactic moment when my breast tissue was “elevated off the pectoralis and delivered from the wound.”

While all this was happening, my weary husband waited, leaning on my daughter, she on him. It would have been about ten o’clock in the morning when my surgeon came out to announce to them what she would later write, that “the frozen section was negative for metastatic disease,” that there were no abnormal nodes, that no further dissection would be needed. She and my husband performed a silent high-five in the hospital hallway. After three hours, she had removed all the cancer she could see and could go about her day, leaving me in the capable hands of two highly sought after plastic surgeons, one being one of the best in Phoenix, the other a master of DIEP flap reconstruction, who had flown in the previous evening from Texas.

They worked on me for the next five hours, and a day later released me back to my life. Four years later, I am told I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, or I summoned the courage to show you, that I really don’t look like myself. Not my original self. Hidden under my clothes, since the DIEP flap reconstruction, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny white scars. Below it, a thin scar, faded to white, stretching from hip to hip, with ‘dog-eared’ reminders on either end where JP drains pulled excess bloody fluid for days after the surgery. I have a right breast too. Sort of. It is in the shape of a breast, impressively so, now that all the post-surgical swelling and discoloration has gone. Its skin is the same, spared by the mastectomy that removed its cancerous tissue through a very small incision around the areola also removed with its nipple.

I tend not to dwell in the macabre, but I cannot help wonder about my old right breast, now a mastectomy specimen preserved in a container of formaldehyde solution. It weighed 294 grams, “the words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.'”

Contemplating all that has happened in the past four years – the cancer, the death of my husband, the shift in priorities – I suppose you could say what they say in Northern Ireland. “God love her, she’s come through the mill.” Lest I wallow too much, however, there is always the reminder that I could be worse off.

A few weeks ago, someone I haven’t seen for a few years, asked me if I had read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Yes. Several times. I know great chunks of it by heart. And then he said, “Well, at least your daughter didn’t die.”

At least your daughter didn’t die.

No. She didn’t. She is right here. She is 18 years old and beautiful. She is tough without being hard. She is vulnerable without the man who was her first word and who bought her ice-cream every Friday afternoon. She learned to drive without him and walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma without his cheers ringing in her ears. She completed her first college semester and earned her first paycheck without the winks and smiles that encouraged her to keep being great at at being herself. Sometimes my lovely girl reminds me of a beautiful bird. Exotic. Rare. Endangered.

On the anniversary of his death, she told me it was beyond her grasp that two years had passed and that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store. To keep her warm.

At least my daughter didn’t die.

So I didn’t know what to say to the person who asked me about Joan Didion and therefore said nothing. Instead I reminded myself of Lou Reed’s reminder of magic and loss and of Sherman Alexie who told us that night in the Heard Museum that when we despair at the lack of compassion in the world, we might remember that the world gave us Hitler – but it also gave us Springsteen.

The world gave us Bruce Springsteen.

And David Bowie. And Glenn Frey. And, yes, the world also gave us Donald Trump. And Sarah Palin. And all the people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. And somehow we have to find the sweet spot in which to live and die.

Magical thinking . . .

So what will I do to mark the day?

A day late, I will climb again to the summit of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It has been a month or two since I sat at the top, and I have missed it. Up there, I will survey the valley below. And, glad to be so high up and far away from where I lay four years ago, I will weep.

It is October 2015 and we are in the throes of breast cancer awareness. Again. #NoBraDay confirms for me that it is still acceptable to sanitize and sexualize a deadly disease, to glamorize and trivialize it in ways that confound me. Once upon a time – if I’m honest – I probably would have participated in the latest breast cancer awareness gimmick, but then breast cancer got me and sent me searching for answers. I keep coming up empty. Here’s the first thing I wrote about it before my diagnosis four years ago:

“My New Pink Ribbon” Nov. 9, 2011

I have shown only a little restraint in not searching every corner of the internet for information about fine needle aspirations and core needle biopsies of the breast. The latter sounds more ominous. November 9th 2011 at 1:30pm, I was scheduled to go to Scottsdale Healthcare for a core needle biopsy. Once again supine in a small room illuminated only by images on an ultrasound monitor and the kindness of two technicians, I was out of sync, discombobulated presumably by the not knowing what was in store for me. More in denial than fear, however, I had not brought my husband with me nor my best friend. I wanted to keep this procedure at the level of an annual teeth cleaning or a pap smear.

In no uncertain terms, I told them I did not want to be talked through the procedure. I just wanted it to be over. But when they veered from the script I had prepared in my head with the doctor announcing they would be doing three biopsies, panic rose the way it does when the pilot announces turbulence up ahead. “Three?” Nobody had said anything about a third; I had barely begun to accept the existence of a second. Again, “Three?” Were they sure? How could there possibly be three tumors in a breast that had passed four mammograms? Discomfited by the almost reassuring response that, yes, the other doctor had ordered three biopsies, I had no choice but to settle in and soon found myself transfixed by the images on the monitor. Strangely hypnotic and relatively painless except when I allowed myself to consider the length of the hollow needle piercing my skin and making its way through three benign or cancerous somethings, and extracting tissue. It was surreal. Stuff of The Learning Channel.

Had I known what they were doing by the time they got to the third one under my arm, I like to think I would have protested the metal marker being placed deep within my breast tissue, in the shape of the ribbon synonymous with the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the search for a cure, a ribbon I have grown to despise. That, and doing things on the count of three. “Relax. One. A little poke. Two. Lidocaine going in. Three.” And then a sound like a staple gun. “You’re doing great.” Three times, I did great. I did especially great on the third one, an awkwardly positioned tumor under my right arm. I didn’t realize just how awkward until the subsequent mammogram, an undignified and ungainly dance, my partner a cheery technician charged with compressing my small punctured breast between the two plates in such a manner that the surgeon would be able to see the new metal marker under my arm. Surgeon. Surgeon? Nobody had said anything about surgery. Or had they? I could not recall. After much repositioning and squeezing and picture taking, someone in another room was satisfied with the X-ray picture conjuring a fleeting image of the Wizard of Oz.

Finally, with a flourish and a big, beaming smile, the technician presented what had been declared a satisfactory mammogram picture of my breast. There it was. Right there on the bottom right of the screen. A new metal tissue marker, fashioned in the shape of the ubiquitous breast cancer awareness ribbon.

Ironically and thankfully, all this took place after we had ushered out October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month (although early in November all those commercials were still airing). In October, there is no escaping all the people in pink, scores of them, running races, hawking merchandise emblazoned with pink ribbons, not knowing where all the money goes or who to ask to get a straight answer. No escaping the business of breast cancer.

I found myself wondering about Susan G. Komen, the young woman who was only 36 years old when she was killed by metastatic breast cancer, and questions about the organization subsequently established by her sister began gnawing at me. Why has the foundation that bears Susan’s name failed to appropriately address the kind of cancer that killed her? Why has the Komen foundation relentlessly emphasized early detection and awareness all tied up in a pink ribbon? Until that tiny metal ribbon had been placed in the tissue of my right breast, I had regarded Komen et al with a mixture of indifference and denial, blithely handing over an extra dollar at the store to go towards “the cure.” I would never do that again.

I had told myself that breast cancer is the thing that happens to other people, to celebrities who grace the pages of magazines, to women who don’t show up for their mammograms. It does not happen to me. Oh, what a fool I’d been – duped and manipulated by its mythology. How jarring it is to contemplate disease and death juxtaposed with all the trappings of breast cancer awareness – ribbons and teddy bears and perfume bottles and cupcake liners. Such trinkets would not be out of place in a 19th century nursery rhyme about little girls, very far removed from the ravages of a disease that kills.

This new affront helped pass the time while I waited in another waiting room, unaware of the tiny patch of red seeping from the biopsy site through to the front of my hospital-issued blue and white striped gown. I had not anticipated blood or ice-packs or the surprise mammogram, but I was beginning to learn that breast cancer brings one surprise after another. Sitting there, exposed and vulnerable, an icepack atop my bruised and bleeding breast, a lovely young woman, dressed in a gown like mine, put her hand on my shoulder and her earnest brown eyes looking into mine, asked conspiratorially if “they” had poked me. Wordless, I wasn’t sure what they had done. No matter, she assured me I would be in her prayers that evening.

It is a strange sisterhood indeed, where an instantaneous intimacy allows us to talk about being poked and staged and prayed for. It made me uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable had I been left out by language. Language is everything. Maybe it can be attributed to my immigrant spirit, but I knew I had to learn the vocabulary, the rules, the norms for breast cancer patients gathered together in waiting rooms. And I had to learn quickly. Apart from the fact that I was well past the best age for learning a second language, I simply did not want to be immersed in this new culture.

I have other things to do. Christmas is coming.

The pathology report would come back on November 11th, Veteran’s Day, a day for remembrance. The Breast Care Patient Navigator, a new one, called to tell me I should really bring someone with me. Did I have a husband? I did? Oh, good. I should bring him along. She would see us both at 11AM on 11.11.11. One of us would listen, while the other would focus on hearing the only words she wanted to hear with Christmas around the corner.

Meta

Immigration matters

From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .